


Negative Two

by bottledyarn



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Flashbacks, Origin Story, Pre-Inception, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3151769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bottledyarn/pseuds/bottledyarn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The truth is, to be frank, a bit stupider.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Negative Two

People who’ve stayed around in the dreamshare business since the beginning like to say that back at the start, there were only a select few people chosen to get involved. They’re lying. It’s easy to believe them, of course, when you look at the number of people who’ve been around since the invention of the PASIV, the numbers match up. But the truth, the truth that they don’t particularly like sharing with newcomers (because the vast majority are either egotistical or so emotionally repressed that they don’t want to have that conversation), is that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved. The reason they can get away with the lie, the reason there are so few of those thousands left, is that the vast majority of them died. 

A lot of them got killed, when they screwed up an operation and pissed off a place like North Korea or Russia, or when they breached security and told outsiders about the PASIV. A lot of them died during the trials of early-mix Somnacin. A lot of them killed themselves. And a lot of them disappeared, assumed dead. They can probably be lumped in with the first group. 

So the early dreamsharers really were selling themselves short, by saying that they were the special snowflakes that the G7 militaries’ selected for this new mission. They were the elite, of course, not every Jo Shmo got chosen to test dreamsharing, but they were also the ones who didn’t get themselves killed. That was the real achievement. 

Eames likes to say that he was one of the original group selected by the United Kingdom to represent their country in the new science of dreamsharing. Everyone believes him, too, but there are a few people who knew better. Eames’ story is that he started out as a typical lackey, just going under and experimenting with what could be done in the dream world, and then discovered the art of forging. The truth is, to be frank, a bit stupider.

The PASIV device was invented five years before Eames managed to get himself involved. Admittedly, nobody really knew what they’d invented for a year of that, but there were plenty people involved in the testing already. 

It all started, as many things do with Eames, with a bet. Or, to be exact, it started with a certain talent. Eames had always taken a certain enjoyment in telephone pranks, due to his uncanny ability to imitate voices. The bet, which came nearly a decade after the last prank, was that he would be able to convince Mrs. Vivian Phillips, wife of Colonel James Phillips, that he was her husband, and he would instruct her to wire money from their account to another one- Eames’ account in particular. 

Eames, not one to lose money on a failed bet, went for it, and was ten thousand dollars richer in an hour. Two hours after that, while he was sitting on a rather uncomfortable chair in a restaurant that had separate menus for all six courses they served, Colonel James Phillips and six other army men picked him up and carried him out of the restaurant and out of his life. 

That’s where the story starts to get interesting. 

 

Eames woke up to complete darkness, and immediately decided, based on the uncomfortable stiffness of his neck, the humid emptiness of the air he was breathing, and the fact that his hands were tied to a chair, that he had a pillowcase over his head. It wasn’t the first time. 

The chair felt pretty sturdy, so Eames sat waiting for somebody to take off the pillowcase so that he could at least see a bit of his situation. It smelled like rubbing alcohol and sounded like the inside of a refrigerator, and Eames wondered if he’d somehow gotten himself admitted to a mental institution with a disregard for human rights law. 

A light hand yanked the pillowcase away, pulling out a few strands of hair along with it, and Eames blinked, trying to get past the blinding light and see the room around him. For a moment he was sure that he’d been right- this was an insane asylum. There were beds, arranged in circles like rays of the sun, around the white room, and several of the circles had people on each bed, their arms propped on little trays so that the thin tubes running from their veins to the gargantuan silver machines in the center of their circle wouldn’t stretch. The machines looked rather like the bastard children of an industrial refrigerator and an old-school computer, and Eames stared at them until the man who’d removed the pillowcase stepped into his frame of vision, hands behind his back. 

“Robert Eames,” the man said, and Eames winced. 

The man raised his eyebrows at that, and brought a thin tablet out from behind his back. He scrolled through its contents briefly. 

“You prefer…Handsome Bob?”

“No, no,” Eames said. “Your alias list must be a few years old. It’s just Eames.”

He raised his eyebrows again. They were poorly groomed, stray hairs in every direction, and if Eames squinted, he could see a few strands of gray. It was harder to tell with his hair, since it was cut as short as it could be without him being bald. 

“I’m Lieutenant Neils,” he said. “I’ve been given the great honor of having you as my little project for the next few weeks.”

“Only a few weeks?” Eames asked, grinning. “Surely if I’m going to be tortured you’ll want more time than that.”

“I think you’re weaker than the others think you are,” Neils said. “I think you’re going to break and we’ll have to give up on you.”

“Ah.”

“Your criminal record is unimpressive,” Neils said, looking down at the tablet again. “It seems as though you were quite the delinquent as a child, and then stopped committing many crimes beside tax evasion once you reached adulthood.”

“I just got better at committing crimes,” Eames said. 

The lieutenant glared at him. 

“I’m going to cut to the chase,” the man said. “You’ve been recruited for a position in the military, and if you do not accept the position, we will dispose of you.”

“I suppose I accept it, then,” Eames said. 

“Well, the first thing we’ll have to check is that you have the right skills,” Neils said. “if you don’t, then it won’t matter if you’re willing, because we’ll get rid of you anyway.”

“What are these skills, then?” Eames asked. 

“Mimicking others,” Neils said. “Essentially.”

Eames smiled. “I didn’t realize that the military required an impressionist for entertainment.”

“It’ll be a bit harder than that, Robert,” Neils said. “You’ll have to become the person.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you,” Eames said. “But that’s not exactly possible.”

A loud noise rang out, and Eames was sprayed with blood. Neils throat had a gaping hole in it, and the man was falling forward. Eames kicked out and sent the chair he was in sliding into a wall. The chair split with a crack, and Eames’ hands were loose, each wrist still wrapped in rope. 

There were heavy boots pounding from outside the doors at the other end of the hall, and Eames froze, standing in the pool of the lieutenant’s blood. 

“Women and children will be spared!” a voice shouted, and the doors started to rattle. 

Eames looked around the room- there was only one woman in the room, a pale woman with a severe bun and an unblemished face, nose sharp and defined. He sighed. Of course, with his luck, he would get into a situation as stupid as this one. If he just was that lady instead of himself, he’d be fine, and he’d walk right back out of this place with not a scratch on him. Apart from the inevitable rope burn around his wrists. The woman had a few bracelets on both of her wrists, and Eames wondered distantly if she was exactly allowed to wear jewelry, what with being a soldier and all. 

The doors slammed open, and a man in a plain white shirt and black pants strolled in, a gun dangling precariously from his right hand. He stopped dead a few steps in, staring across the room at Eames. He glanced down at the woman, her head a few feet from where he stood. Then his face broke into a smile, and he came quickly across the room, tucking the gun away. 

“What a pleasant surprise,” the man said. 

Eames squinted at the guy, trying to see if he knew him, if he’d somehow made a good impression on a crazy man at some point, if that was why he wasn’t full of bullet holes. 

“Do I know you?” Eames asked, and paused. His voice didn’t sound right. 

“Mr. Eames,” the man said, coming to a full stop a few steps in front of him, toes nearly brushing Lieutenant Neils’ head. “Why don’t you have a quick turn around for me?”

Eames turned, uncomfortable with the idea of turning his back on a man with a gun, but seeing no other option. 

The woman from before was standing just in front of him, and Eames stumbled backwards, the woman doing so as well. 

“Fuck,” Eames said. “Is that a mirror?”

In a blink, the woman was him, staring back with much more familiar eyes. 

“You’re hired, Mr. Eames,” the man said. 

Eames looked up in the reflection to look at the guy, but was met with the sight of the barrel of the gun. He watched his blood spray against the mirror, immediately covering the reflection of his forehead being split open wide, white bone cracking. 

Eames woke up to a white ceiling, and for the second time in a day, wondered if he was in a psych ward.

 

There are some boring bits that even those who are willing to tell the true story (i.e. NOT Eames) tend to leave out. Eames goes under about a thousand times, turns into little girls and big burly men and dogs and butterflies. He likes to talk about it as though he was a prodigy, but anyone who knows anything would be able to tell you that quite a few Colombians had managed to figure out the whole deal of forging right towards the start, a few years in, when a PASIV was swapped in exchange for prisoners by the USA. Ironically, that exchange was also the reason why the USA was pushed out of the G7 group and ostracized by the other, original dreamsharing countries. You’ll get why that’s important in a minute.   
Long story short- don’t worry, you really don’t want to hear the long story- Eames got pretty decent at forging. Moderately good, even. But there’s a big difference between playing around and actually doing a job. 

 

Eames, dressed in ordinary clothes- the kind of plainclothes that are just too ordinary, and scream out to anyone with a clue that the person wearing them are usually in a military uniform- got ushered into the back of a van, pressed knee to knee and thigh to thigh with people he’d hardly met. 

“We can’t tell you much,” the woman to his right said. “The subject we’re working on knows all about this stuff, he does my job for the Americans.”

“Your job?” Eames asked.

“I research,” she said. “I’ve determined that this man knows what we want to know, and I know plenty more about him too. What you need to know, and think about, is that this guy is a professional, he’s the best at what he does, and he’s very good at preventing any problems. I think that the only way we’re going to get him to let his guard down is with a little bit of romance.”

“Romance?” Eames asked, raising his eyebrows. 

“Yes. And that’s where you come in,” she said. “I would do it, but I’m going to be busy with what I’m trained to do, and besides, he’d probably recognize my face since I’ve been lurking about watching him for a while.”

“So what do I do?” Eames asked. “Flirt with him?”

“Yes,” she said. “Pick a character, someone made up, so that he’ll have no chance of recognizing the forgery, and romance him. Dress yourself in something low cut. Big knockers, probably a good idea. I watched him for months, and nobody’s ever approached him to try and flirt or anything, so he’s probably gagging for it by now. Should distract him enough, and open him up enough, so that we’ll be able to do what we need to do.”

“Sounds easy enough,” Eames said. 

“I certainly hope so.”

The van pulled to a fast stop in front of a broken down hotel, and they all piled out, and Eames was ushered into a room on the ground floor. A man was sprawled on the floor, a pillowcase over his face, IV in his arm. The PASIV, the newest model, loomed in between the two beds, about the size of a dishwasher. Eames hopped onto the bed closer to the door and reached for an IV, slipping it in quickly. 

The others, all stern professional types, laid themselves down and quickly followed suit, leaving the man who’d been driving the van to press the plunger. Eames’ last thoughts before he slipped under was a distant worry about any fleas or bedbugs being on this old mattress. 

The dream was utterly boring- it looked just like reality, nothing fun. Eames assumed that there were a few traps for the man’s projections to tumble into, and wondered if he ought to have been told about those beforehand. 

The woman from the van walked in front of him abruptly, holstering a gun.

“The target’s in the bar,” she said. 

“You realize I don’t know what he looks like,” Eames said. 

She smiled. “He’ll be the one in the suit that looks more expensive than a car,” she said. “Black hair, probably messy, and he’ll look like he’s about eighteen. He’s twenty one, though, don’t panic.”

Eames nodded, and turned towards a shop window to shimmy into the skin of a pretty blonde girl. It was an easy one. He decided to go for a slightly Midwestern accent, and as he pulled open the door to the posh bar, he decided on a name. Everything else he could whip up on the fly. 

It was too easy to spot the guy- he was sitting at the far end of the bar, staring at the door. Eames walked in, careful on his high heels, and the guy grinned, dimples appearing instantly. Eames walked over, the guy’s eyes on him the whole time. 

“Who might you be?” the man asked, twisting to look at Eames, his gaze not leaving direct eye contact. 

“I’m Becca,” Eames said with a smile. “I saw you through the windows, and I wanted to say hi.”

The man nodded, the grin coming back. 

Eames started to climb onto the bar stool beside the guy, but his hand snapped out. 

“I’d rather be alone, thank you,” he said. Eames froze. He thought that this was going superbly. Apparently not. He eased back down, fiddling with his little silver bag. 

“I thought we had a connection,” Eames said. “A little eye magic?”

“No.”

“Tell me your name?”

“No.”

Eames turned and walked out, doing his best to exude the vibe of a jilted lover. He turned around the corner, in the alleyway between the bar and the next shop, and let Becca slide away. He closed his eyes, wriggling into the visage of the rather beautiful bartender who’d been filling the man’s drink as they spoke. 

The backdoor to the bar wasn’t locked, and Eames walked in, waiting only a few moments before the projection teetered into the back area on her impractical stilettos. Eames slit her throat, wondering distantly if she was a projection based on a real person or not. He walked out, carrying a box of little umbrellas, hoping that she hadn’t mentioned to the patrons why she was walking out. 

He messed with the ingredients for a few moments before walking over to the man, taking his empty drink with a smile. 

“Rough day?” he asked. “You might want to slow down.”

“Not really,” the man started, looking down at his nails critically. “I-”

He stopped, lifting his head and squinting. Eames wanted to squirm, feeling almost pinned by the intensity of-

 

“No.” Eames said, reaching out a foot to push Arthur, lounging in his nice little rolling chair, across the room. “I did not feel pinned by the intensity of your gaze, you egotistic bastard.”

“You looked like I’d just killed your mom,” Arthur said, rolling back. 

“I don’t know who to believe,” Yusuf said. “Eames said that it worked with the first girl, when he told this stupid story yesterday.”

“Eames is a liar,” Arthur said. 

“He did try to tell me once that he’s in the royal family,” Ariadne offered, leaning over a table full of sketches a few feet away. 

“That’s somewhat true, actually,” Arthur said. 

“See?” Eames said, leaning back in his chair. “I think my version is the right one.”

“Oh, please,” Arthur said. “Anyway.”

“No, let me,” Eames said. “You make me sound like an idiot.”

 

Eames was standing there, looking dumb as a stump, his pretty painted red lips parted, eyebrows all furrowed, trying to figure out what was going on.   
The man stood up and left. Just walked out, and Eames ran out the back of the bar, deciding as he was running to give a male forgery a shot. By the time he caught up to the man, who’s just moseying on down the street, taking things in, he looked like he might be David Beckham’s cousin. 

He sped up just right so that he bumped into this guy, and then stumbled and fell to the ground. The man turned around and reached down to help, but then stood back up again after glancing the guy up and down. 

“Excuse me,” he said, and walked off again. 

Eames stood up, brushing off the dirt and the disguise. 

“Hey!” he shouted, and the projections were all starting to get a little funky. 

The guy turned around, and Eames started to see that same little glint of amusement show up before it turned into shock.

He walked back towards Eames quickly, crossing his arms. 

“Are you really stupid enough to be doing this?” he asked. “If I ever see you in the street now, you won’t be a passing face, I’ll recognize you.”

“Obviously?” Eames asked. 

The man laughed, the dimples making an encore appearance. 

“You’re a newbie,” he said. “You’re gonna be dead in a week. If I don’t manage to kill you, or one of my coworkers, then your own boss with string you up.”

“Such harsh words, darling, I-”

“It’s Arthur.” 

“Ah,” Eames said. “Arthur.”

Arthur shook his head, still grinning. 

“When you wake up, tell your teammates that they’re all imbeciles, stomping around in my head like they think they’re being sneaky. Tell them that they need a bit more practice, because the only reason why this is working, why I’m letting them take the secrets in my head, is because they’re not secrets. I don’t get told anything until I have to know it, so it’s all old news.”

Eames nodded. “Okay.”

That made Arthur laugh again. “If they honestly thought that I didn’t know this was coming- Oh, god, it’s absurd. Have fun explaining why you and your teammates are all on America’s wanted list come tomorrow morning. You were actually the one I didn’t already know about before this, they must keep you tucked away somewhere safe.”

Eames stood in the middle of the street, watching as this kid detailed exactly why he was the winner in this situation, and wondered what age he’d gotten involved at. Had he ever lived a normal teenage life? 

 

“Okay,” Arthur said. “Technically, that’s pretty much accurate, but you made me sound like an asshole.”

Yusuf cackled. “It sounds about identical to you.”

 

Eames stared at Arthur, eyes confused and serious. Then he smiled. 

“You paused for a second with that last attempt,” Eames said. “You thought that one was hot.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “All of your little facades were perfectly hot, that’s why you chose them.”

“I’ll assume you’re including this one in there,” Eames said, gesturing at himself. “Should have opened with this one.”

“I might have punched you,” Arthur said. 

“Or kissed me,” Eames offered. 

Arthur pulled a gun out of the back waistband of his pants, levelling at Eames. 

“Have fun in the real world,” Arthur said. 

Eames didn’t bother trying to dodge out of the way. He had a sneaking suspicion that Arthur was a bit of a sharp shooter. 

The mattress definitely had some kind of bugs. Eames sat up in it with a wince, scratching at the back of his head before pulling out his IV. Arthur sat up too, pulling the bag off of his head and shaking his head, pushing his hair off of his forehead with a casual gesture before detaching the IV. 

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Arthur said, offering a hand to shake. “Didn’t catch your name.”

“It’s Eames,” he said, standing up to shake the hand. 

“I’d advise you to run, Mr. Eames” Arthur said, fingers moving nimbly over the surface of the PASIV before deftly tugging a little metal square out from a port on its side. “Kenya would be a safe bet for you. Might even make it out on a plane if you move fast enough.”

The man disappeared out the door, and Eames paused only a moment before following him out. He caught up to him as he was walking out of the hotel the back way.   
“Back to America?” Eames asked, walking nearly shoulder to shoulder with the man. 

Arthur hummed noncommittally, checking his watch and pausing. 

Eames stopped, turning towards him. He decided, still a little foggy-drunk from the Somnacin, to lift his hand under Arthur’s chin and press a brief kiss to the man’s lips. 

Arthur stepped back with an appraising look before checking his watch again and continuing towards the street. 

“Best of luck to not get shot,” Arthur said, giving a vague salute before sliding into a car that pulled up to the curb just at the right moment. The window rolled down. “You’ll make more money in the illegal side of this business, Mr. Eames.” 

Eames watching the car pull away, and he started walking along the road, finding his phone in his pockets and getting to work booking a flight to Kenya. 

 

“So that’s how you fell in love,” Ariadne said, sliding into a seat to complete the little circle of chairs. 

“No,” they both said. 

“Not quite,” Eames said. “If one is hatred and ten is love, I’d say we were about a negative two.”

“Zero, I’d say,” Arthur said, tapping his foot against Eames’ chair. “Today I’d say it’s a solid two and a half.”


End file.
